David Mamet

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses, through the review of the plays, "Sexual Perversity in Chicago" and "The Duck Variations", the unique style of David Mamet. It examines how Mamet?s basic approach to creating his own uniquely styled art is to mix seemingly disparate elements, such as tragedy and comedy, high and low culture, sexuality and innocence, life and death, and abstract philosophy and overt social commentary. It also looks at how the basic attempt of his plays is, though ?experimental? theatrical methodologies, to somehow critique the alienation of society and reflect its cracked and porous social structure through a language that is similarly cracked and distorted.

From the Paper:

"Mamet, however, does not limit his artistic approach merely to the considerations of language and his formal experimentation with the most fundamental elements of drama hardly stops there at all, indeed, he also experiments with a number of other issues and considerations, not the least of which are the things that he does with both time and space onstage. Indeed, Mamet keeps are attention glued to the stage by constantly changing our relationship to the narrative of the play by jumping around drastically in time and space and offer very little orienting information to tell us when such a leap or a jump has occurred. The point of these fractures of the basic fabric of spacetime, at least in the world of what we, as an audience, see onstage, are multiple and varied."

More papers on David Mamet:

• Analytical Essay # 3408 : "David Mamet: The Mystery of an Icon"
• Analytical Essay # 113379 : "David Mamet's "Sexual Perversity in Chicago"
• Term Paper # 121196 : "Black Arts Movement"

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